Following fathers, missing mothers: Child-parent attachments in Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night

There is a significant history of criticism on Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams fiction as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night. Analysis of both works has included many psychoanalytic readings but none incorporating John Bowlby's theory of attachment, which provides a framework for examining an individual's closest interpersonal relationships. An attachment theory reading of these texts reveals the way that conspicuously absent mothers and strongly influential fathers play a significant role in shaping the characters' lives and, therefore, the narratives themselves.;Attachment theory establishes a set of criteria for attachment relationships, the particular bond formed between an infant and her primary caregiver(s). The unique aspects of initial attachment relationships in early childhood form the basic pattern that an individual will instinctively follow for all intimate relationships later in life. While traditional psychoanalysis works backwards from an end product, such as an adult's neurosis, attachment theory begins with descriptions of childhood personality development to work prospectively. This distinct directionality does serve to make the theory potentially difficult to apply to fiction, as it requires description of childhood experiences. However, in a novel or set of short stories that follow the relationships of a character over the course of a lifetime, as the Nick Adams stories and Tender is the Night do, the principles of attachment theory can be applied as a way to analyze those relationships and their effect on the character's development.;Navigating among existing Nick Adams criticism, I will endeavor to analyze those relationships in order to establish a structural paradigm for the stories, one which is best expressed in the terms of attachment theory. I will then proceed to examine Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night, where attachment theory will provide a new way of looking at the central relationships that drive the narrative. Ultimately these readings expose the importance of child-parent attachments in both authors' texts and demonstrate the value of attachment theory as a tool for literary analysis.